U.S. military veteran Zue Jernstedt describes in this interview with Kelly Doyle her voyage on the Global Sumud Flotilla and the subsequent ordeal she endured in a notorious Israeli prison.

Zue Jernstedt is a U.S. Army veteran turned anti-imperialist activist who sailed earlier this month with the Global Sumud Flotilla’s veterans’ boat, Ohwayla, to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza and challenge Israel’s naval blockade. Her boat was intercepted in international waters; she was detained and later released via Jordan. In this conversation, Jernstedt reflects on her path from soldier to solidarity activist, the voyage and interception, detention conditions and the political stakes of sea-borne aid. Now back in the United States, Jernstedt continues organizing with veterans and solidarity activists calling for an end to U.S. military aid to Israel. 

Kelly Doyle: What called you to join the flotilla?

Zue Jernstedt: Well, funny you should say “call.” I was called by my friend, my Palestinian American friend, Dina, who I had been with in the West Bank last year. We’d been doing protective presence together. She called and asked if I knew any boat people. I said, “No, I don’t have any money for boats. Boat stuff is expensive — I’m not part of a yacht club or something.”

Then she said, “Well, there’s another flotilla, and there’s a veterans’ boat.” I’m a U.S. Army veteran, so as soon as she said that, I was like, “Yes, 100 percent, I want to be on that.”

Kelly Doyle: Before the Sumud, what were you doing in the West Bank?
Zue Jernstedt:  I was with the International Solidarity Movement. It’s the group Rachel Corrie was with — who unfortunately lost her life to a bulldozer that the Israelis were driving — and Aysenur Eygi, who was killed by an IDF sniper last year.

The organization places people with families in the West Bank. Generally, you stay with farmers or shepherds, and when they’re harassed by illegal settlers — when their homes are burned, their animals attacked, or they’re being physically attacked — you record it on your phone. That footage becomes part of what goes into the ICJ (International Court of Justice) rulings.

Mostly, I would walk around with shepherds all day. It was a very nice, calm lifestyle, where you’d go to bed when it was dark and wake up when it was light, live off the land until an illegal settler would come and start harassing you, being violent.

Kelly Doyle: You’ve said you once participated in imperialism as a U.S. service member. When did that realization come, and how did it shape your decision to confront state power rather than enforce it?

Zue Jernstedt: I came to the realization that we were the empire while I was deployed in Afghanistan. It took me about 10 years of unpacking that — reading a lot, learning history, examining my own prejudices and confronting the propaganda I’d been fed my entire life.

I’d been aware of Zionism since before Oct. 7, and I’ve been staunchly anti-Israel for a long time. When the genocide started, it was an easy choice for me, especially knowing it’s funded by American tax dollars — when we don’t have money to feed our children, and we’re killing children overseas.

Kelly Doyle: How long were you at sea, and where did you depart from?

Zue Jernstedt: I was on the flotilla for 32 days. We took off from Barcelona. The first leg, from Barcelona to Tunis, was supposed to take three days, but it took eight. In Tunis, our boats were bombed twice. We met up with the Italians, then the Greeks.

Kelly Doyle: What happened en route?
Zue Jernstedt: When we were leaving Italy, we were attacked again — drones bombed our boats. My boat was the first one hit. The ordnance struck our deck and bounced off. They were the equivalent of flashbangs — not frag grenades meant to kill, but still really loud with a lot of fire. We figured they were trying to damage our sails and scare us. Two boats did get their sails damaged, and one woke up to find an unexploded device on board. Another veteran and I had to toss it overboard. It turned out to be detonation cord — the kind used in mining to set off larger explosions — bundled together to make a big fireball, but it hadn’t gone off.

Zue Jernstedt: After that, we waited in Crete a couple of days to repair the boats. Our main boat, Family, got sabotaged, so it went down, and we had to divide everyone among the smaller boats. That’s when we got two influencers on ours for the first time — David Adler, a political analyst, and Quentin Quarantino (Tommy Marcus), an activist with about 1.2 million followers on Instagram. They hadn’t been on a small boat before, so the rocking hit them hard at first.

Our boat ran on a tight schedule — rotating food, cleaning, and night-watch shifts. We all managed to be very calm and chill with each other. There wasn’t much conflict.

At one point, I accidentally scared Tommy on his first night shift. The boat was rocking hard, and I told him, “If you fall over, you die.” I was being snarky, but it’s true. Then he had a panic attack and went downstairs, and I had to go down and say, “I’m sorry… . I promise they put you with me, because I will keep you safe and I won’t let you fall overboard.”

David was so anxious during the chase he kept standing up, thinking every light on the horizon was an interception. We kept telling him, “Sit down — we’ll tell you if it’s real.” The next morning, he said, “Last night was great,” and I just laughed — he’d been panicking the whole time.

(Tommy Marcus and David Adler) both brought a new energy to the boat, even if they were terrible at doing dishes.

Then, from Crete, we sailed straight on until we got intercepted.

Kelly Doyle: Describe the chase before boarding.

Zue Jernstedt: It took them six and a half hours to intercept us. We were chased by them for six and a half hours, evading them multiple times. The last three times we evaded them, we were pretty heavily mocking them.

It was a U.S.-built ship. This was a U.S. war vessel chasing us — a boat full of American veterans. They tried to spray skunk water on us — one of their specialties — but we kept evading, doing evasive maneuvers, and then pointing and laughing at them. They were in this giant ship with spotlights on us, so they could definitely see us. When we did it the third time, we heard a faster boat coming up. And we were like, “Okay, we’ve made them mad. It’s time.” They wedged us between two of the Zodiacs (rigid inflatable boats).

They had five people board us: four men and one woman. The woman was only there to search the women, which I found really interesting. Like, you kill children, and yet you’re so concerned about being “appropriate” when searching someone — illegally taking us from international waters, but making sure there’s a woman to search the women.

They searched us and then brought us downstairs, one by one. That was probably one of the only moments I was really worried. I remember thinking, Why is it only the women going down? But they put us in the living room area of the small sailboat, where they’d laid cushions from the bunks on the floor. There were two couches, and they told us to sleep in that room and not to leave it.

We spent about 20 hours on that boat with them before finally arriving at the port in Ashdod.

Kelly Doyle: Under international law, was what happened to you legal?

Zue Jernstedt: The Fourth Geneva Convention states that starving a civilian population is a war crime. International humanitarian law protects humanitarians delivering aid — they cannot deny different groups access. They kidnapped us on open waters; we were nowhere near anyone’s territorial waters. One boat actually managed to make it within what would be considered Palestinian waters. They completely violated our rights. They said we weren’t prisoners — they were keeping us hostage.

Kelly Doyle: What happened during detention?

Zue Jernstedt: (Itamar) Ben-Gvir [Israeli minister of national security] came and started screaming at us that we were terrorists and that we killed babies. Even on the ground, in our stress positions, we weren’t allowed to look up. If you lifted your head, they’d smack it back down or slam it to the floor. Even then, we were still telling him, “You’re the terrorist. You kill babies. You’re the terrorist.” Because of that outburst, they came around with the thin black zip ties.

From then, I lost my sense of time.

I’m a disabled Army veteran with severe back and shoulder injuries. From what I know, it was five or six hours in that stress position. Then a soldier grabbed me to get up, and I couldn’t move that fast after being restrained for so long. He yanked my arm and dislocated my shoulder — it just popped out.

He marched me to the processing center in front of us and cut my zip ties. My hands were discolored. Then I was made to strip again in front of women. They told me to keep my underwear on, but I refused because I had started my period, and they wouldn’t let us get up. I was completely bloody, so I said, “If you want to search me, you’re going to search me.”

After that, we went through different stations of biometrics, where they scanned our eyes and fingers. They searched our backpacks and threw away almost everything we owned, including my VA medication. I told them, “That’s from the Veterans Hospital — I’m a U.S. Army veteran,” but they laughed and threw it away. They also took my sketchbook. One of them flipped through it, called others over, said, “Wow, amazing,” then looked me in the face and threw it in the trash.

It was so petty — just trying to get a rise out of us. I thought, “okay, I see what this is,” and reminded myself these were younger people, early 20s. These people were just in the IDF. They could have been in Gaza — maybe even responsible for killing children and families. There was no reason to expect them to be anything less than not decent.

Then they gave us three forms — two in Hebrew and one in English. The English one said I had illegally entered Israel, that I was waiving my right to a judge, and that I’d be deported within 32 hours. I refused to sign because I didn’t illegally enter Israel; I was forcibly kidnapped.

After that, they zip-tied us again, this time with thick white Flexi-cuffs — the kind usually used in pairs, but they only used one. We were put in a prison bus divided into small cells. I was in a three-person cell with two other women. I ended up sleeping on the floor so the other two could lean on each other. The ride was about two or three hours. Then we arrived at Ktzi’ot, a famous detention and terrorist prison center.

Kelly Doyle: What happened after you arrived at the detention center?

Zue Jernstedt: They put us in with all women. Then we were separated into cages and brought in one-by-one to get gray sweatsuits. After that, they took me into a room, and a guy asked, “Are you okay?” I said, “Yeah, I guess,” and he sent me out. I found out later that was the doctor — the one who was supposed to take medication requests.

We were then put into another cage with women who’d already been processed. I had started my period and was bleeding through the new clothes they gave me, leaving a mark on the ground where I sat. I kept asking to go to the bathroom. When they finally let me, I tried to use pads, but they hadn’t given me new underwear. When I came out, I asked if I could wash my hands. The guard said no. I held up my bloody hands, and she backed up and pointed to the sink.

Then we were put on another bus and taken to our cells.

Zue Jernstedt: The first few days, I slept on the concrete floor because there weren’t enough mattresses. We kept asking for more, and they’d say, “Five minutes, five minutes.” Eventually, after we screamed for hours, they gave us some.

That’s when those of us who’d had our medication thrown away started to feel really sick. I was also on a hunger strike. One girl had a UTI so bad she was peeing blood, turning yellow, running a fever, and passing out. We screamed for hours for a doctor, but no one came. We put her in the recovery position and waited. They never gave her medical care.

We weren’t allowed out of our cells, and when we asked why we didn’t have prisoners’ rights — which were literally written on the door — they told us, “You’re not prisoners. You’re hostages.”

Kelly Doyle: Did you receive medical care?

Zue Jernstedt: A doctor asked what medications I needed and ended up giving me some kind of aspirin. I’m on Wellbutrin for depression and Adderall, and stopping those so suddenly was very not fun.

Kelly Doyle: Which medications were taken from you?

Zue Jernstedt: The ones for my back. I take gabapentin, and I take methocarbamol, which is a muscle relaxer. I’m on Wellbutrin for depression and Adderall. I ended up just passing out on the third day.

Kelly Doyle: Who did you meet in detention, and what did you learn?

Zue Jernstedt: Lorena [Delgado-Varas] was from Sweden — she’s a parliamentarian — and she talked about the rise of the right there. Renaz [Ebrahimi] taught us a verse to this beautiful Arabic Palestinian song, and we were singing almost the entire time. Jasmine [Ikeda], who’s Indigenous to Hawai‘i, was teaching us hula moves. Everyone came from such interesting backgrounds and had so much knowledge.

We were released on Oct. 7. My theory is they couldn’t keep us as hostages while crying about their own. When I saw a doctor before release, he asked what medications I needed. I listed everything for documentation. He gave me aspirin and said, “I’m so sorry.” I said, “What do you mean? This was all by design.”

Toward the end, they started acting nicer, probably because some detainees had visible bruises and injuries that could cause problems for them.

Then we were put on another prison bus, this time in a larger compartment, and taken to the Jordan border. There, we met [someone from] the U.S. Consulate to Jordan. She came up to us and said, “I’m not your babysitter. I’m not here to babysit you.”

Most of us were filthy, weak from hunger strikes, and just trying to contact someone from our delegation. She told us, “America doesn’t pay for tickets for citizens. We don’t help with transportation.”

We tried to reach our people but had no phones — the numbers we’d written on our bodies had sweated off. The consul said, “If you absolutely don’t have money, the U.S. offers a $5,000 loan with interest, and we keep your passport until you pay it back.”

We said, “Great, we’ll pass.”

Eventually, we reached other Global Sumud members who told us to meet at a hotel. The consul  had told us we had to go straight to the airport because of our transit visas, but that wasn’t true. We told our driver to go to the hotel instead. The U.S. consul followed us in a car, but we went anyway.

Source: Consortium News

Photo: A Members of Veterans for Peace aboard the Global Sumud Flotilla. (via Veterans for Peace, instagram)

Former U.S. soldier Zue Jernstedt sailing to Gaza (Rompeviento TV, 09.29.2025)